Mustard & Leaven, Pearls & Treasure,
or what does it mean to give up everything?
St Michael’s, Mount Dinham, Exeter,
Trinity 10, Yr A, 2008
‘In his joy he goes and sells all that he has and bought it.’
+ In nomine …
What would you be willing to sell to buy the Kingdom of Heaven, if it were for sale? We might imagine the ad in a local estate agent window…
Perhaps we need to begin by reminding ourselves what exactly we mean by this phrase that Our Lord uses so often, ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’. Our gospel today has a number of parables to help us in this task. The mustard seed, the Leaven, the treasure and the pearl all have one thing in common: they are small and hidden. This is not something we normally associate with kingdoms, even the tiniest ones like Monaco or Liechtenstein are normally pretty hard to miss, with huge pieces of land, flags, border controls, tanks, palaces and all the rest. But the Kingdom of Heaven is different from the kingdoms of this world, it is small and secret, like the mustard seed, which is ‘the smallest of all seeds’ or like leaven hidden in meal or buried treasure or a pearl. In the words of the hymn, ‘we may not see her armies, we may not see her king, but her fortress is a faith heart, her pride is suffering; and soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase and her ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace.’
The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ as Christ says elsewhere ‘is within you’, it is simply the rule of God in our hearts, as we pray in the Lord’s prayer: ‘Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done.’ Notice that the Kingdom of Heaven, is not just where you might expect it to be, high up in Heaven, but in Christ, it has come and made its home on earth, and it continues to arrive day by day: ‘thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’. But if it has no walls, the kingdom of heaven is not just within us, its fortress may be hidden in our hearts, but its effects are visible here and now in the world. God’s rule is not something private, an escape from the world, it is gathers people together into a new community. The Church is not identical with the Kingdom of God, but it is the sign and sacrament of that Kingdom in the world. For when that mustard seed grows, ‘it is the greatest of shrubs’, Christ says, and ‘all the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.’ It is like a net gathering fish of every kind. All are welcome in this kingdom, regardless of race or class, in fact particularly those who are normally excluded and cast out of polite society, the poor and despised, the sick and sinners. Here all are welcomed by the loving arms of their Heavenly Father. And so it is a kingdom which secretly transforms the world: mustard, as St Augustine noted, is hot! Like salt or light which Christ speaks of elsewhere, it changes the things it encounters. But perhaps the best picture Christ gives us of this power of change is the leaven. This tiny substance causes the meal to heave and bubble until it is completely leavened into something different. This is the effect that God’s rule has on our lives and that, through us, it has on the world. We are to ferment the Kingdom! ‘You are to change the world!’ says St John Chrysostom. ‘The kingdom of God’ says St Paul, ‘is justice and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.’ It is like a great wedding feast, it is life in abundance!
Back in the estate agent, we may be beginning to think this Kingdom is worth some serious money. In fact we probably doubt if we can afford it. The parables of the hidden treasure and the pearl are all about how precious the kingdom is. In the case of the treasure someone simply stumbles across it, while the pearl is found by someone who has been searching for pearls. Similarly some are looking for salvation for years when they find the Kingdom of Heaven, while others simply stumble across it. But in both parables the one who finds it sells everything he has to get it. This sounds pretty crazy, if he’s sold everything he has, what will he do tomorrow for food? More than this, there seems something pretty weird about trying to buy one’s way into the Kingdom of Heaven, even if it’s with everything you have. Because generally we tend to put a price on things that are only of middling importance, like houses, cars, dogs, books, food and so on. The really important things in life are beyond buying and selling, things like mums and dads, children, truth, friendship, our souls, lovers, cannot be bought and sold without turning into something else, they are ‘priceless’. They must be completely free to be real, a mysterious gift of grace.
A number of Our Lord’s parables point to this free gift of the Kingdom, how it cannot be earned: the prodigal son, or the labourers in the vineyard. And yet, because it is free, does not mean it’s cheap or worthless. God’s rule is costly. These two parables, the hidden treasure and the pearl, show that it is precisely ‘priceless’, the most valuable thing there is, so valuable that one should give up everything for it. So, curiously, you don’t have to decide what you will give up for the kingdom, that Jaguar, the villa on the Costa del Sol, because it will cost us everything we have. The Kingdom is not one possession alongside others, ‘here’s my London house, my Devon cottage and my place in the Kingdom of Heaven’, just as our faith should not be section of our lives. We have to give up everything to God’s rule, because everything is changed by this. We give up everything we have, not just our possessions, but our relationships, our very selves. But this is not something miserable which leaves us empty, with nothing. The man goes ‘with joy’. Christ lays down his life, in order to take it up again; we die to the world in order to live; ‘he who loses his life will save it.’ This is the mystery of the Cross and Resurrection. So we give up everything, including ourselves, only to receive it all back again, as Christ promises, ‘a hundredfold now and in the age to come.’ Perhaps we might wonder if this is why the householder brings out of his treasure things new and old, not as if some things are new and some old, but that all the old things that were given up are now at the same time received back as something new. This is what happens in the Mass: we bring ourselves and everything that we have, give them up to God, renouncing any sense that they belong to us alone, only to receive ourselves and all that we have given back from him, transformed in Christ into a new creation, part of the Kingdom of God.
In nomine…
AMEN.